NASA’s most awesome mission since pointing at the sky and saying “I bet we can put people there” has come to fruition, with absolute proof that there’s water ice on the Moon - and lots of it.
The Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite (LCROSS) is the most explosive euphemism since Tom Clancy discovered the thesaurus. It ’sensed’ the contents of the lunar crater Cabeus by dropping an entire Centaur rocket booster into it, and when you ‘drop’ something in orbit it’s very much like ‘fired at’ by the time it hits the ground. The booster slammed into the shadowed regolith like a two ton bullet, blowing a twenty meter hole in the moon and ejecting dust tens of kilometers into space - where the LCROSS satellite, chasing the Centaur, could get a good look at it for four minutes before its own suicide strike into the same crater.
Both impacts were observed by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO), the one part of the mission not designed to explode part of a astronomical body that day. Spectrographic analysis unequivocally confirmed the presence of water, and that it made up a whole percent of the ejected material, so when we do build bases in the moon there’ll be plenty of this all-important liquid for the taking. Even more interestingly, there were organic compounds as well as an unexpected amount of mercury, so in true science tradition we’ve spawned two more questions in answering one.
The permanently shadowed craters of the lunar poles seem to act as frozen traps for material moving through the solar system, collecting meteors where nothing will disturb them - until some awesome apes from another world blow them to bits. And then those apes get to work out what happened, and why, and what we’re going to do when we get there!
Luke McKinney
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